


Barren Ground

by KMDWriterGrl



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 06:59:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KMDWriterGrl/pseuds/KMDWriterGrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Janeway brings up questions of faith and religion to her first officer after an experience with another culture’s arduous religious rituals. A post-ep for the third season episode “Sacred Ground.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barren Ground

**_“_ ** **_Good seed don't grow on the barren ground. Good things don't come along as you just sit dreaming on_ ** **_. Good seed don't grow on the barren ground. Say everything fades away, there you are still around--Oh, what'll you do? Oh, where will you go?” –Bruce Hornsby_ **

It didn’t surprise Chakotay overly much when Janeway appeared at the door of his quarters that night. In spite of her four day ordeal on Nekani, he knew that there would be no sleep for his captain until she’d come to some sort of conclusion about what she’d experienced on the planet. 

“Commander--” she started, then changed to “--Chakotay.”

He ushered her inside. “I think I know what this is about.” 

She nodded, her eyes hollow with exhaustion and something else he couldn’t define. 

“Come sit down.” He waved her to the couch and she sank onto it with a grateful sigh. “The Doctor would vivisect me if I gave you coffee. How about some tea?”

“Tea would be lovely, thank you.” She shut her eyes, only opening them once he was standing over her with a steaming cup. 

“What’s bothering you, Kathryn?” He had a fairly good idea but wanted to hear her verbalize it. 

“I think I’ve just had my faith shaken,” she said softly.

Chakotay nodded. “I figured this was coming. I saw your face in the sanctuary.”

“It’s rather an odd twist, isn’t it?” she asked with a sardonic laugh. “Usually people have their spiritual faith shaken by the scientific. I’ve had my scientific faith shaken by the spiritual.” She shook her head. “Can you even call that faith? The certainty of science, math, technology, and logic--is that faith?”

“I guess that depends on your definition of faith.”

“What’s yours, Chakotay?” She studied him with intense eyes. “What do you call faith?”

He thought for a long moment. “Faith is a lot of things but at its very heart I would say that faith is certainty; it’s conviction. It’s the foundation or principle on which you rest a belief. It’s someone or something that you’re always certain will be there, wherever “there” may be.”

“Then by your definition, you think it IS possible to have faith in science?”

“Of course. As humans we have faith in many principles of science—faith that gravity will function as it should to keep our feet on the ground, that H2O will remain water without suddenly mutating into acid. We have faith that the earth will remain on its axis, that the moon will cause the pull of the tides. If that’s your faith, Kathryn, it’s a solid one.”

“But there’s more to it than that,” she explained earnestly, leaning forward to meet his gaze. “I have faith that science can provide me with answers. There’s no puzzle that can’t be solved, no question that can’t be answered. What we’ve learned of the world over thousands of years, we’ve learned through science, not religion.”

“Are you saying religion has never played a part in human discovery?”

“I’m saying that, to me, religion has never gotten humanity anything but holy wars and unanswered questions.”

Chakotay studied her with amused eyes. “You’re very hard on religion.”

“It nearly killed Kes.”

Chakotay corrected her gently. “A radiogenic field nearly killed Kes.”

“A radiogenic field used as a part of a religious ritual.”

“And that same radiogenic field saved her life.”

Janeway leaned back with a profound sigh. “Yes, it did. And I don’t know why. Oh, I listened to the Doctor’s report. It makes perfectly logical sense …”

“…Except where it doesn’t,” Chakotay finished. “And that’s what has you so confused and upset. The science says one thing … but you felt another.”

“A radiogenic field of that strength should have killed us both,” Janeway said. “You know that, Chakotay. You warned me it would. But it didn’t. At the very least it should have knocked me unconscious. Instead—“

“Instead it healed Kes.”

“Yes.” It came out as a whisper. 

“And there’s something else,” he prodded gently. “You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t.”

“I saw--” She faltered, looked up at him with haunted eyes. 

“What did you see, Kathryn?”

“The ancestral spirits.”

“You did?” He blinked. It was an interesting admission coming from his logical and ordered captain. 

“I did. But they weren’t the Nekani ancestral spirits.”

“Then who--?” And then it came to him exactly “who” she had seen and he understood why Janeway was troubled far beyond the extent of a brush with another culture’s religious beliefs. “You saw your father.”

One of the many discussions they’d had on New Earth was the loss of their respective fathers. He knew all about Edward Janeway’s death on Tau Ceti Prime. 

“I saw my father.” Her lips barely moved as she murmured the words. “I never thought I would.” She met Chakotay’s eyes, anguished. “Is that what I’ve given up?”

“I don’t understand.” 

“By choosing science over religion. Have I missed seeing my father because I believed, as I’ve always believed my entire life, that it’s impossible to see someone after their death?”

“Kathryn …” He laid a hand over hers and she turned her palm into his, holding on with all the strength she could muster. He wanted badly to touch her face. “Faith doesn’t make the impossible possible. No religion, no faith, no amount of belief can bring back the dead. When I go on a vision quest and I seek to speak to my father, I’m not conversing with a spirit or a ghost. I’m speaking to the parts of myself that represent him and all that he taught me. I will never again see him or speak to him as he was when he was alive. It isn’t possible.”

Tears puddled in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks and he did reach up to brush them away.

“The point of the vision quest, of any religious ritual in which we seek answers from spirits, is to free the mind of problems and worries so that it can focus on what our loved ones would say if they were with us again.”

Her face was both relieved and disappointed. “So … I didn’t see my father?”

He laid a hand on her cheek and she was disheartened enough to allow herself to lean in to the comfort of the tender caress. 

“No, Kathryn. You didn’t see your father. Not in corporeal form. But could your mind, in a moment of fear and uncertainty, have brought his face to the fore-front of your consciousness? Yes. In which case you DID see him … and you can see him again any time you want to if you train yourself to do so.”

She looked hopeful this time. “I can?”

“Of course you can.” He traced his thumb over her cheekbone before dropping his hand. “Do you remember how I taught you to contact your animal guide?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“It’s the same ritual, just a slightly different technique.”

A smile broke across her face. “Will you teach me?”

“Now?” Chakotay laughed. “You haven’t had enough rituals for one day?”

“This is one I want to learn.”

“Then I’ll teach it to you.” He rose and gathered his medicine bundle, then placed it on the floor and gestured for Janeway to join him. “Do you have faith that this will work?” he asked, half-serious. 

Her answer sent a warm blush across his cheeks. “I have faith in you.”

He lifted her hand, placed it palm down on the _akoonah_ and left his own hand covering hers, both as a reassurance and a promise to be her guide. 

“ _Akoochimoya_. We are far from the sacred places of our grandfathers, far from the bones of our people …”

END 


End file.
